Ravensberger Land
| location | |
|---|---|
|
|
| Basic data | |
| State : | North Rhine-Westphalia |
| Administrative region: | Detmold administrative district |
| Region: | Ostwestfalen-Lippe |
| Surface: | approx. 755 km² |
| Residents: | approx. 580,000 (2005) |
| Population density : | 768.2 inhabitants per km² |
| Highest points: |
320 m above sea level NN : a. On the Polle (Bielefeld) b. Heidbrink ( Hüllhorst ) |
| Deepest point: | 41 m above sea level NN (north Weser Valley ) |
| map | |
|
|
The Ravensberger Land ( East Westphalian : Ramskenbrink ) is a cultural landscape in East Westphalia-Lippe in northeast North Rhine-Westphalia . It lies between the Wiehengebirge in the north, the Teutoburg Forest in the south, the state border with Lower Saxony in the west and the great Weserbogen and the Lippe district border in the east. It thus essentially comprises the Westphalian part of the Ravensberg hill country . The most important cities are Bielefeld (with its northern and central districts), Herford , Bad Oeynhausen and Bünde .
Features of the landscape are an old, intensive agricultural use under the special conditions of the loess hill country, diverse industry and a high population density. Historically, the area is shaped by centuries of belonging to Prussia . Up to the 20th century its population was purely Evangelical-Lutheran and used a common dialect, the Ravensberger Platt.
The Ravensberger Land is expressly not to be equated with the natural area of the Ravensberger Mulde or the territory of the Grafschaft Ravensberg . It is often overlooked that these three terms are based on different contexts of meaning and that their reference spaces, despite large overlaps, are not congruent.
geography
Demarcation
The Ravensberger Land is surrounded by the cultural landscapes of the Minden-Lübbecker Land in the north and northeast, the Lipperland in the southeast, the East Münsterland in the southwest and Osnabrück Land in the west.
The ridges of the low mountain ranges mark clear natural boundaries to the north and south-west and at the same time form the dividing line between the inner hill country and the surrounding lowlands. Both have brought about a different cultural landscape development, although historically, denominational , and sometimes dialectic, there are quite close connections in these directions. The opposite is true to the south-east and west, where the hill country initially continues and a change in the landscape is not noticeable. Here the political dividing lines were decisive, as they had developed since the 17th century when the parts of the Ravensberger Land, unlike Lippe and Osnabrück, fell to (Brandenburg-) Prussia. At times, representing regular state borders, these dividing lines are still present in the consciousness of the population as the Westphalian-Lippe border or the state border with Lower Saxony.
Thus, like few other cultural landscapes, the Ravensberger Land can be clearly defined.
area
The Ravensberger Land comprises the entire Herford district except for the Uffeln district of Vlotho , the municipalities of Bad Oeynhausen and Hüllhorst in the Minden-Lübbecke district, Werther in the Gütersloh district and a small northern part of Borgholzhausen , and finally the Bielefeld districts of Mitte , Dornberg , Gadderbaum , Heepen , Jöllenbeck , Schildesche and Stieghorst , together around 755 km² with around 580,000 inhabitants (2005).
Also south of the Teutoburg Forest, i. H. in the southern part of Bielefeld and in the north-western district of Gütersloh , one sometimes identifies with the term “Ravensberger Land”. However, this is based on a different, purely historical criterion, namely the earlier belonging to the County of Ravensberg , whose ancestral seat from around 1080 to 1346 was Ravensberg Castle , located on a southern ridge of the Teutoburg Forest in today's Gütersloh district . In terms of cultural landscape, this area is closer to the Münsterland .
Natural space
The Ravensberger Land is largely formed by hill country, in addition there are the facing slopes of Wiehen and Teutoburg Forest and the area around Vlotho, which is part of the Lipper Bergland . The hill country is predominantly covered with loess and is therefore very fertile. In connection with the relatively high rainfall, Schüttler coined the term “wetland”. Numerous streams, the sifts that have been redesigned by human hands , have cut deeply and given the land a crooked relief. It is drained by the Werre and its tributaries Else and Aa towards the Weser, which still touches the area in the northeast. While the original oak and hornbeam forests have almost completely disappeared in the hill country as a result of intensive agriculture, there is dense, forestry mixed forest on the steep mountain slopes .
history
Political and Conceptual History
In the Middle Ages, the area was divided between the county of Ravensberg , the Minden monastery and the monastery or the imperial city of Herford . In the 17th century the three territories of Herford, Ravensberg and the Principality of Minden , which had now become completely Lutheran, came to Brandenburg-Prussia and were united in the administrative area of Minden-Ravensberg in 1719 .
As a result, the name Ravensberg passed from the county to the core area of Minden-Ravensberg, which was clearly delimited by the low mountain range and thus also to formerly Mindische areas, favored by the cultural landscape commonalities in the Ravensberger Mulde area that have existed since ancient times. Compared to the similarly shaped neighboring areas around Melle and Lippe , however, the political borders continued to have an impact, and there were also certain denominational differences. Unlike the Lutheran Minden-Ravensberg, the Osnabrück region was mixed Lutheran and Catholic and came to Hanover, the Calvinist Lippe remained independent for a long time. In the 19th century, the Ravensberger Land was strongly affected by Lutheran Pietism and the revival movement . The sermon and missionary work of the Lutheran pastor Johann Heinrich Volkening in particular led to a considerable growth in numerous parishes. The piety found a special expression in the trumpet choir movement , which under Johannes Kuhlo from Bielefeld- Bethel radiated throughout Germany to Protestant regions. The awakening found another expression in the Diakonie through the founding of Volkening and Friedrich von Bodelschwingh .
The term Ravensberger Land , which is now gradually becoming naturalized , thus described a landscape that had its own political, denominational and, with the beginning of industrialization, more and more economic aspects, and thus represented its own cultural landscape.
After the brief interlude of the Napoleonic era , the area belonged to the administrative district of Minden in the Prussian province of Westphalia from 1815 . At the lower administrative level, the district of Bünde , the district of Herford (since 1878 also the newly formed urban district of Bielefeld) lay entirely, the (rural) district of Bielefeld predominantly and the districts of Halle (Westphalia) , Lübbecke and Minden to a small extent in the Ravensberger Land.
In 1946/47, with the end of Prussia, the province of Westphalia was absorbed into the newly formed state of North Rhine-Westphalia ; the above-mentioned administrative division has existed at district level since 1973.
Settlement history
The fertile loess soils led to an early settlement of the area. The oldest cores of the settlement landscape go back to the old Saxon times. Traces of settlement have already been archaeologically proven for the pre-Roman Iron Age . Mainly in the 18th century the large-scale clearing of the forest-bearing lowlands and the conversion into green and arable land then took place . So today only the surrounding mountainous areas are continuously forested.
The landscape of the Ravensberg hill country is generally characterized as a park landscape . Typical of these are relatively numerous copses and bushes within the predominantly as arable and grassland used Feldflur and originally pronounced scattered settlements , d. H. In addition to small village centers, there were numerous individual farms , which, with their half-timbered buildings and Eichkämpen, were of essential importance for the scenic charm of this area.
The fertility of the area, together with the heuerling system and the current inheritance law, led to overpopulation and impoverishment of large parts of the population in the 18th and early 19th centuries, which could not be absorbed even by the aforementioned internal colonization ( brand division ). It was only through considerable, broad-based industrialization, partly driven by the Prussian state, following the construction of the Cologne-Mindener railway , that the steadily growing population was gradually able to earn a living. Nevertheless, there was still strong emigration for a long time, v. a. to America . The combination of the still existing rural character with strong industrial influences was a typical feature of the Ravensberger Land well into the 20th century.
The time after the Second World War brought another increase in the population through displaced persons , and the continued prosperous economy also attracted immigrants. Today Bielefeld (which extends beyond the Ravensberg hill country in the south) is in 18th place among the German cities and the Herford district is one of the most densely populated (rural) districts in Germany. The area forms the core area of the conurbation Gütersloh -Bielefeld-Herford- Minden .
The high population density in connection with the increasing demands on living space, mobility and infrastructure, especially from the middle of the 20th century, limit the old charm of the Ravensberg cultural landscape more and more. To be mentioned here are v. a. the massive urban sprawl and the fragmentation of the landscape due to road construction. In addition, in the wake of the wave of modernization since the 1960s, local politics in many places paid little attention to the historical rural building stock.
literature
- Adolf Schüttler: The Ravensberger Land . Aschendorff, Münster 1986.
- Hans Riepenhausen: The rural settlement of the Ravensberger Land until 1770 . Munster 1938.
- Lutz Volmer: From the "Westphalian rural design". House construction in Ravensberg between 1700 and 1870 . Klartext Verlag, Essen 2011, ISBN 978-3-8375-0368-5
- Gertrud Angermann: Angels on Ravensberg farmhouses. A contribution to the change in decor from the 18th to the 20th century . 2nd edition 1986 ( full text as PDF )
Web links
- Search for "Ravensberger Land" in the German Digital Library
- Search for "Ravensberger Land" in the SPK digital portal of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation
Individual evidence
- ↑ Dictionary of "Farm and Dialect in Ravensberg" edited, supplemented and re-edited by Heinrich Stolte by Olaf Bordasch
Coordinates: 52 ° 7 ′ N , 8 ° 40 ′ E